Johnny Abbes García

Johnny Abbes García was the feared chief of the governmental intelligence office during the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. He is mostly regarded as a ruthless murderer and as the real mastermind behind most of the human rights violations during Trujillo's regime.

Abbes is said to have been born to a well-off family. As a young man, he participated in literary circles, and one of his first jobs was as a sports reporter. Later, in a date that is not too clear, he moved to Mexico, from where he started to gather information on anti-Trujillo dissidents and relayed this information to the island. Abbes, after Trujillo's half brother Nene introduced him to the dictator, quickly became the chief planner of assassinations of the regime's adversaries abroad, one of the most infamous being the car-bomb attack on Venezuela's then-president Rómulo Betancourt, who barely survived.

The level of cruelty and sadism of Abbes is legendary. Dominican ex-president, and world known writer Joaquín Balaguer (who was one of Trujillo's closest aides) wrote that he once ran across him in the halls of the Dominican Presidential Palace, and saw him avidly reading a book on Chinese torture methods. It is said that many of the dissidents that were imprisoned by the Dominican intelligence services were tortured and killed by Abbes himself, a favorite method being the tossing of the still-living prisoners to sharks in the waters of the Caribbean Sea.

After Trujillo's assassination in 1961, Balaguer quickly named Abbes consul to Japan to remove him from the spotlight. Not long after that, Abbes was a sort of nomad wandering around Europe, before he finally settled back in the Caribbean, though this time in Haiti. There he began working for François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, the then dictator of that country, as a security advisor. True to his scheming ways, he was later involved in a plot with Duvalier's son-in-law to oust the tyrant. Papa Doc's response to this was to send a death squad to his home, shoot him and his family, and then blow up the house.

Though there was one eyewitness to the execution (a woman who lived next door, and belonged to an international organization), some say that Abbes survived the explosion, and changed his name and lived/lives "incognito" at some undisclosed location. [http://www.aprodeh.org.pe/democracia/democracia1/c_op_15may2000i.htm]

There is also a story by a Gerry Hemming (leader of a group of anti-Communist soldiers of fortune who trained anti-Castro Cubans in the early 1960s), who says that in 1963, Abbes and Trujillo's eldest son, Ramfis Trujillo, were in a meeting, in Haiti, with other unknown men for the purpose of giving money to partly finance the plot which would result in the John F. Kennedy assassination, allegedly as revenge for the supposed CIA involvement in the assassination of Rafael Trujillo. [http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKhemming.htm]

In the fictionalized historical novel "The Feast of the Goat", about Trujillo and his regime, Mario Vargas Llosa devotes quite a lot of paragraphs to describe Abbes and his work.

ources and references

* "Los Rasputines" - Mario Vargas Llosa, 1998. [http://www.caretas.com.pe/1998/1518/mvll/mvll.htm]
* "La Môme Moineau" - Michel Ferracci-Porri, novembre 2006 [http://www.editions-normant.com Editions Normant]